Again, Exon explained about the oversight committee that controlled access to the information about the crash. Exon was telling Schmitt what he knew, based on his position as the base commander at Wright-Patterson.
Schmitt asked, "Was there any name for the operation?" Exon answered, "Well, I…no, I don't recall that there was. Our contact was a man, a telephone number. He'd call and he's set the airplane up. I just knew there was an investigative team. There probably was a name but I…"
There was a slight break in the tape and then Exon said, "…Stuart Symington, who was Secretary of Defense [actually he was Under Secretary of War for Air in July 1947], Joe [actually Carl] Spaatz [Chief of the Army Air Forces]…all these guys at the top of the government. They were the ones who knew the most about Roswell, New Mexico. They were involved in what to do about the residue from that…those two findings."
Schmitt said, "You say those two.
Exon answered, "Probably part of the same accident but two distinct sites. One, assuming that the thing, as I understand it, as I remember flying the area later, that the damage to the vehicle seemed to be coming from the southeast and northwest but it could have been going in the opposite direction but it doesn't seem likely. So that farther northwest pieces found on the ranch, those pieces were mostly metal [again I note that he is confirming more than one location for crash related debris]…"
Exon described the debris that had been found, saying, "…couldn't be easily ripped or changed…you could change it. You could wad it up you could change the shape but it was still there and…there were other parts of it that were very thin but awfully strong and couldn't be dented with heavy hammers and stuff like that…which at that time were causing some people concern…again, say it was a shape of some kind you could grab this end and bend it but it would come right back. It was flexible to a degree."
Since Exon began claiming, at lease to the ears of some debunkers, that he had flown over many sites and was only speculating, a letter he sent me on November 24, 1991 becomes important. At that time I had been accused of misquoting Exon. After I supplied a copy of his taped interviews, a copy of the book showing the context of the quotes that I had used, I asked in what area Exon believed he had been misquoted.
He wrote back, "I'm sorry that a portion of my interview has caused you trouble. I will acknowledge that the 'quick' quote does have me saying that my flights later, much later, verified [sic] the direction of possible flight of the object. I remember auto tracks leading to pivital [sic] sites and obvious gouges in terrain."
In 1998, Exon was interviewed by Tom Carey, a careful researcher living in Pennsylvania, in an attempt to clarify some of the confusion that had grown up around Exon’s statements about the crash site. Now, instead of suggesting that there were multiple sites and multiple locations, Exon again talked of two distinct sites. He spoke of them as if he had known, in 1947, what he was seeing. He knew that these were the locations where the metallic debris, and the craft and bodies had been recovered. He told Carey that there had been discussion in the aircraft, meaning the one in which Exon was flying at the time, about the Roswell crash. The idea that Exon’s testimony was “speculation” is an obvious attempt to reduce the critical information to unimportant. Audio tapes of that interview also exist.
What becomes clear upon reviewing the tapes, the 1991 letter, and the new interviews by Carey and Rudiak, is that Exon was not speculating about these events and activities as some now suggest. There is nothing in the statements he made, nor in the letter he wrote to me that suggests that he wasn't discussing what he knew from either first-hand observation or communication with those who were directly involved. The speculations revolved around what happened after the debris or bodies had arrived at Wright-Patterson, not about the recovery of the craft, material or bodies. In fact, he wasn't even speculating about some of the testing. He said that he received the information about the tests from technicians who had actually conducted the tests and whom he personally knew.
Exon said that the material, the metallic debris, was flown on to Wright Field. Pappy Henderson, a pilot with the 1st Air Transport Unit at Roswell, said that he was one of the pilots who flew the debris to Wright Field.
Exon talked of the bodies coming into Wright Field. Helen Wachter, was visiting a friend with a new baby, when her, the friend’s husband came home, somewhat agitated. He was an MP at Wright Field and was talking about aliens that had been brought into the base. She, at first, thought he was referring to people from another country, but it soon became clear he was talking about creatures from another world.
Exon described the debris in the same terms used by a dozen other witnesses including Bill Brazel, Major Jesse A. Marcel, Master Sergeant Lewis S. Rickett, Sergeant Robert Smith, Sallye Tadolini and Loretta Proctor. There is no indication that Exon was personally acquainted with any of these people, though it is clear that he was aware of the Roswell case and its implications before any investigator interviewed him.
Exon's somewhat vague description of the location of the impact site agrees with what has been suggested over the last several years. In fact, looking back to his statement about two distinct sites, there is another clue about the validity of the statements made by Exon. He said, "So the farther northwest pieces found on the ranch, those were mostly metal."
He was speaking of flying over the two sites, and if he had followed the conventional wisdom, if he had followed the scenario developed in the late 1970s, then Exon's statement should have read, "So the farther east pieces found on the ranch…"
Clearly Exon was not speculating, nor was he drawing on what he might have read elsewhere. He was describing, in the first hand, a situation he had witnessed. And, as the investigation continued, drawing on the testimonies supplied by Edwin Easley, Lewis Rickett, W. Curry Holden (a historian who did research in the Roswell area in 1947), Thomas Gonzales, and the second-hand information from Barbara Dugger (granddaughter of Sheriff Wilcox), it is obvious that Exon's claim that the impact site was to the southeast of the Brazel ranch was correct. This suggests an inside and intimate knowledge of the events near Roswell. Exon was not relating what he believed to be the truth, or was speculating about what he believed to be the truth, but was describing the situation as he had lived it in 1947. The statements he made on tape and the words he used are crystal clear.
The question to be asked, then, is if Exon was speaking candidly, and if the information is accurate, then why now the claim that he was speculating? The answer is threefold.
First, it seems that the change in Exon's attitude was precipitated by outside events. Exon provided many facts that he should have kept to himself. He was caught him off guard by the first interviews, speaking of events that were more than thirty and forty years old. He assumed that the information was no longer classified and it was no longer important to keep it hidden. Because of that, he spoke freely of events he should have kept to himself.
Second, some of the controversy around Exon's statements were the result of the politics inside the UFO community. If Exon was telling the truth about the development of an oversight committee to control the debris, craft, and bodies, and if his information was accurate, then clearly the MJ-12 documents were fraudulent. The wrong people were named on the oversight committee. Because of that, proponents of MJ-12 claimed that Exon had been misquoted. Rather than suggest where Exon was wrong, they attacked the accuracy of the quotes, ignoring that the fact that the statements were recorded on audio tape and some of those claiming that I had misquoted Exon had heard the tapes.